Numerous recipes to enhance the flavour, juiciness and tenderness of meat and poultry are known. These predominantly are rubs, marinades and bastes that are applied to the surface of the meat and are used during grilling or several hours before cooking. Rubs include spices and herb mixtures. Marinades are made up of several components including oil which is used to help keep the meat moist, an acidic liquid such as vinegar or citrus juice to help tenderize, as well as herbs and spices for flavouring. Bastes, liquid solutions that generally contain some oil, are applied to keep the meat moist and to seal in the juices. These methods have the drawbacks of not distributing the enhancements consistently and throughout the meat.
Commercial processes directed toward enhancing flavour, juiciness and tenderness of meat and poultry have emphasized injection techniques for bastes and solutions. This creates the possibility of distributing the enhancements better in the meat. These techniques are often used to compensate for lost juices that result from lengthy cooking periods. Various innovations in injection technology have been made and are widely used for commercial processing, but involve difficulties and inconveniences, especially as they relate to adopting popular consumer recipes and ‘clean labels’.
Malinow, U.S. Pat. No. 3,615,689 discloses a method of injected basting of an edible fat emulsion into the breasts of turkey with an amount of emulsion equaling 3 percent of the carcass weight. The basting emulsion is composed of a minor amount of water with a major amount of vegetable oil, using a mixed hydrophilic-lipophilic emulsifier and ingredients such as salt, flavouring, colouring materials, etc. The water-in-oil mixture must not separate and remain a smooth emulsion for processing and thus an emulsifier is used to form a stable emulsion. Further, this technique is a manual (not a continuous) process which increases manufacturing cost.
Additional flavour and moisture enhancing solutions have been developed to enhance the eating qualities of meat and poultry. Dressed meat can be injected with a solution, typically by multi-needle injection. This technique involves piercing the meat thereby improving the tenderness and overall textural quality of meat. This technique is well understood in the industry; some standard apparatus and methods are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,338,150 (Nordin), U.S. Pat. No. 3,779,151 (Ross), U.S. Pat. No. 3,922,357 (Townsend), and U.S. Pat. No. 4,690,046 (Corominas).
Other prior art techniques of increasing the water-binding capacity of the meat involve injecting solutions containing dissolved sodium chloride and sodium tripolyphosphate. Without these ingredients, the solution may leak out of the meat product during distribution or during cooking by the consumer creating a problem of excess weight loss and little improvement in quality. However, this technique can be undesirable due to nutritional considerations such as the sodium and phosphate contents of the resultant meat products which adversely impact their consumer appeal. In addition, many desirable additives cannot be utilized in the prior art injection solutions. Examples include oil products such as butter that do not mix in water and ingredients like native starches that do not dissolve in water but disperse instead. As a result, oil and insoluble ingredients do not distribute uniformly throughout the water solutions or remain homogeneous through the injection process or otherwise plug the hollow injection needles.
A moisture enhancing process for meat and poultry typically increases the weight of the product about eight to twenty percent. Although some of this added water evaporates during cooking, the meat has a higher water content when cooking commences, and thus, the cooked meat may have a higher moisture content after cooking as compared to a non-enhanced meat. Prior art techniques utilize high levels of salt and sodium phosphate to influence moisture retention.
Consumers today want ‘clean labels’, which focus on fewer and more natural ingredients and includes claims such as no additives, no preservatives and no artificial flavours or colours. Accordingly, a need remains for a process which utilizes oil-in-water emulsions or extremely fine dispersions of insoluble natural ingredients that can be distributed throughout a meat and poultry product to enhance flavor, juiciness and tenderness while limiting the amount of fat.